Telecommunications service providers continually increase the number of services and products they offer to customers. A recent trend, for example, is a desire to offer broadband, wireless, and Internet services. As competition increases, service providers must provide an increased level of support for these advanced data services while keeping costs down.
Conventional operational support systems typically rely on a single monolithic system to tie together multi-vendor hardware and software systems. As a result, no one system in the operational support system stands out as best of breed with respect to performance and flexibility. Moreover, as individual components are added to the single monolithic system, the resulting system becomes overly complex to develop, enhance, and maintain over the span of the product life cycle.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an operational support system that facilitates the integration of advanced data services and products with existing (or legacy) telephony systems.